Business Week recently published an interesting article
"The Friendly Face of Business Software" on the increasing attention being given to the usability of enterprise applications. The real thrust of the article is that the success of on-demand vendors such as Salesforce & NetSuite vs. the traditional large enterprise software companies has been driven predominantly by the ease-of-use of their applications and the loyalty this generates with the business people that actually have to use them.
One quote that immediately stood out for me:
To really appreciate the change, consider just how frustrated the buyers of business software had been. Companies spent buckets of money in up-front costs, and then more dough getting that software to work. Even more galling for tech managers is the reality that a lot of people outside of, say, the accounting department, never bother to use the products because they're too geeky and complicated.
This sounds very familiar to the comments we hear from people that have rolled out unsuccessful ECM systems. With the exception of heads-down workers using imaging & workflow apps for things like claims handling or accounts payable, who basically have no choice, getting information workers to engage with ECM has proved to be desperately difficult.
The article also touches on the reason why the big software companies have been so wrong-footed in the last year, and I agree with it.
Good design is becoming more than a nice-to-have feature. Thanks to slick Web sites like Amazon.com, people are coming to expect software that takes no or little training to use.
The Ajax revolution in the consumer web market has simply raised the expectations people have of their business software. It's worth clarifying that we are talking about browser-based software. Starting in the late-nineties, there has been a wholesale shift in large organizations to web apps. The last statistic I saw was from Gartner who estimated that in 2003, 70% of corporate application development was already web-based. The rationale for this was all about saving deployment costs and the drivers of the change were the IS folks who were responding to the leaner budgets of those times. (Great story about an unusable expense-reporting web app that delivered its ROI by deterring the filing of expense claims
here...) . However the pendulum undoubtedly swung too far hence the new drive for usability & productivity.
Phil Wainewright at ZDNet blogged on the Business Week article, and in my view summed up the situation better than the original:
The debate is nothing to do with hosted versus on-premise. It's about a completely different philosophy of building applications that people just use, and love using. There was a time when software developers aspired to build the next big infrastructure play. Many of them still do. But now the future is in the long-neglected backwater of usability. If users can't get productive with your application in minutes, it's history.
I completely agree with this, except to say that usability isn't just about getting productive in the first few minutes. Sure, an application needs to be simple & easy-to-learn to get people started. The bigger challenge, however, is to make an application that is efficient so that as people need to use it more and more they don't become frustrated. This is particularly true of ECM where people's need to interact with the system grows in relation to the committment of others and the value of the content being put into the system. ECM projects don't tend to fail at the outset - there is always a honeymoon period - the problems tend to come later.
Efficiency is hard to achieve with traditional server-side, page-centric web application techniques. There are just too many clicks and screen refreshes.
Ajax can make a tremendous difference.
